For the past few years, a handful of developers has been experimenting with the idea of first-person games that don’t rely on guns and gore. These alternative approaches have taken numerous forms. Some opt for horror, while others emphasise survival. Many choose a combination of puzzling and narrative to hold the player’s interest, putting varying degrees of emphasis on one or the other. Mind: Path to Thalamus is a little different. Its weapon of choice is awe.
Thalamus features puzzles and narrative too, but it sets them up within astonishing environmental design that will leave you gazing in slack-jawed delight. It’s one of the very few examples of the form that could realistically dispense with any player interaction whatsoever; puzzles, storytelling – it could drop them all and it would still be absolutely worth your time to investigate. But it contains these elements as well, for better and worse.
The story concerns a family of tornado chasers, who are stuck in a cycle of tragedy caused by their meteorological obsession. In a bracing opening sequence, your character is standing in an idyllic Menorcan coastal harbour with a tornado rapidly approaching the shore. Instead of trying to escape, you’re forced to run towards it, swerving into a building as the swirling storm seems to engulf the whole sky. It roars onto the land and begins pummelling the house, knocking objects off shelves and ripping shutters from windows. The last sight you witness is the dark vortex pulling you towards it on a first-floor balcony, before the screen flashes white.
It’s a truly captivating beginning to a game. Immediate, unique and thrilling. Indeed, it would make a fantastic start to any story. Sadly, the rest of the game’s plot is nowhere near as compelling. There’s nothing wrong with the concept, which sees your character traversing a series of mindscapes while in a coma, seeking absolution over his role in the deaths of two of his relatives. It’s all very meta, but meta can be brilliant provided it’s done well.
Unfortunately, it isn’t. The combination of a clumsy script and hammy voice acting make the narrative an irritation that inevitably hinders enjoyment of an otherwise superb game. It wishes to be introspective, but it comes across as solipsistic whining. The character seems to moan endlessly about him being a terrible person and how bad he feels for the neglect and cowardice that caused the death of his relatives. But these individuals are never contextualised for the player, or given any dimensions or shades to their personalities that might make us care about their demise. It gets worse as it goes along, attempting to negate these infuriating traits by pointing them out as part of the story, which is the worst way of dealing with a narrative problem.
The reason we’re discussing this issue now, rather than at the end of the review, is because it isn’t the primary factor you should take away from this review. The writing is dreadful, but the game makes up for it in so many other areas. Moreover, since the game’s release, the developer has stated that it’s working on a rewrite of the script. It’s going to take a lot of work to redress the narrative’s issues, but at least there’s a chance they might be fixed by the time you play it. Even if it isn’t fixed by that point, Thalamus is still absolutely worth experiencing. Visually and systemically, it’s one of the most
intelligently designed games we’ve come across in a very long time.
Thalamus constantly introduces new vistas and environments, each one more astonishing than the last. From the real-world setting of stormy Menorca we’re taken on a tour of fantastical terrains, including towering cliff faces, vast deserts sparsely strewn with strange ruins, picturesque grass-covered hills and valleys, and a series of rocky islands floating in the sky. Its influences range from the work of Salvador Dali to films such as Inception and Avatar, and it’s all beautifully blended together over the course of four hours of exploration.
You can see much of this spectacle in the screenshots, but you can’t see how these landscapes change depending on your actions. Thalamus is a puzzle game that evolves in an intriguing fashion. It begins with some ingenious spatial trickery that’s representative of your transition from the real world to the dreamlands. Then, on the shores of your character’s subconscious, it spends half an hour or so playing with invisible platforms hidden amid ancient architectures, encouraging you to think outside the box.
Eventually, the puzzles and environments coalesce. Standing on certain areas, subtly marked by a bed of flowers or a clump of dead trees, alters the environment. One turns day to night, one makes it rain and another changes summer to autumn. Each transformation also has a secondary effect, such as making wooden platforms grow or pathways materialise. These environmental states can be locked into place by placing what looks like a bundle of nerve fibres into the relevant space.
Thalamus uses this concept to great effect, creating some pleasingly brain-tickling puzzles that always challenge but rarely obstruct. Often, they’ll require several of the nerve bundles, where finding the solution involves working out how to access them in the correct order. In addition, because the bundles are spherical, they can roll down slopes, adding an element of physicality to these conundrums.
Thalamus cleverly meters out both the concepts and difficulty as well, always introducing a new idea or environment-type at the perfect moment, keeping you engaged. The only issue in terms of play is that there’s no manual alternative to the autosave feature. As such, if you need to suddenly stop playing for whatever reason, you may need to start a puzzle all over again, which can be frustrating.
Despite its narrative troubles, Thalamus is one of the most fascinating games we’ve covered this year. Its remarkable visual design and perfectly pitched puzzles more than compensate for its wonky writing, and every game developer could learn a lot about how to start their games from Thalamus’ punchy, gripping introduction. What’s more, as a debut title from developer Carlos Coronado, it also shows potential for incredibly exciting ideas to come. RICK LANE
VERDICT
Visually stunning and intellectually gratifying, Mind: Path to Thalamus is only let down by a clumsily told story.